Mid-April was filled with an odd unease at work. It wasn't something people ever discussed—no official emails, no red-flagged priority memos. But it hung around like dust before the storm, heavy and inescapable.
They walked quicker, quieter, shoulders squared. Directors glanced around each other during video calls, their eyes darting to silenced notifications. The coffee machine drained twice as quickly, its hum punctuated by worry.
Even the breakroom gossip, once full of benign rumor and wearied laughter, was reduced to soft whispers.
Yoo Minjae saw it all. But he didn't grill. He listened.
At 9:43 a.m., the first official warning came in the guise of a throwaway note through the internal portal: the audit team was coming. "Routine compliance check. Nothing out of the ordinary," it read.
Routine? Minjae didn't think so.
He felt the knotted shoulders down the corridor. The grinding jaws. The way Director Jang, normally an unbreakable brick wall of calm, had begun shutting down his meetings behind conference room drapes.
Morning sync was ordinary. Minjae at his desk, flying fingers quiet, gathering the information others did not catch. Fluctuations in team spends. A minor change in Procurement's supply chain. An unexpected burst of logistics reporting. Individually, they were insignificant—innocent even. Trends never appeared on their own.
He leaned back, his gaze sweeping his inbox. Not for the words spoken, but for those that had stopped speaking altogether. Meetings begun in the middle. Reports left incomplete. Individuals suddenly carbon-copping managers on emails they never used to.
Enough proof, silently piled.
Seori showed up just in time for lunch, her voice a mere whisper beside him. "Have you seen anything. unusual lately?" she whispered, looking at him.
Minjae narrowed his eyes. "Weird? How weird?"
He looked around with a stiff movement. "I don't know… People are tense. Yesterday, I asked one of the people in Audit how long they'd be around, and he didn't even acknowledge me. Didn't even glance my way. And last week, IT came over to review my system access logs. Said it was a random audit."
He looked at her contemplatively. "Could be."
"You don't think anything's random," she charged, hoping.
Minjae hesitated. Then, after a moment's pause, he said, "No. I believe in silent reasons."
She nodded with deliberation, as if that made a word of it that she'd only theorized in her gut. "If you hear anything—"
"I will," he said. And then, barely above a whisper: "Careful."
"Careful?" she asked in bewilderment.
"Sometimes speaking is louder than silence," he replied, look level.
They looked at each other for a moment, the silence massed between them. Seori slowly stood up and nodded, her steps light as she walked away.
And finally, the office emptied out under a canopy. of April rain. Minjae was left at his desk—not working on documents, but exploring a secret folder on his encrypted drive. The documents seemed harmless: clippings from newspapers, scientific articles, environmental data. There was method to his choice, though, below the surface.
An abandoned copper mine in Inner Mongolia, abruptly closed for "geological instability.".
Unexplained electromagnetic spikes along a distant Icelandic lava flow, with no tectonic activity.
An ecological warning for a Canadian lake, where water temperatures suddenly changed.
Individually, they were noise—statistical anomalies one could safely disregard. Collectively, they created a pattern that was suggestive of something older, something buried beneath the veneer of corporate ledgers.
He glared at the figures in frustration. Not proof. Not magic. Simply potential.
His mind, once snake-twisted in flame and instinct, had years ago mastered the art of thinking in terms of systems. He did not rule from above anymore. He marched rather behind pillars—initiating system changes, playing games for the long haul, constructing invisible leverage.
His hand was already spreading wide, unobtrusively. Small subsidiaries, none with his name. A South Korean logistics company. A shell investment house channeled through Busan. A mineral distribution business buried under layers of shell groups.
In the office, he made discreet suggestions—soft prods that converted marginally unprofitable purchases into investments down the line.
Credit was not needed. Credit was risky. It attracted notice.
In the house, his father sat in front of the TV—a news anchor speaking rapidly about a new AI company breaking IPO records.
His father looked over at him without taking his eyes from the TV. "You ever consider opening your own company?"
Minjae stirs his rice deliberately. "Not really.".
"Why not? You're a numbers guy. Always have been."
He shrugged. "Desiring to excel at something doesn't equate to me wanting to be a people manager."
His father chuckled. "Aye. You'd scare investors with that face."
A small smile flickered on Minjae's lips. "Exactly."
They ate in contented silence after that. The kind of silence only family can maintain—no wheedled conversation, just presence.
Later, washing dishes, Minjae's thoughts drifted back to the conversation. Not to start a company. But because the potential was viable, even for the sake of humor.
Control was not a matter of signing on the dotted line. It was about taking away space—unbroken, secret space in which to build, see, and wait outside of the vortex of regular life.
His eyes wandered to the creased atlas he'd taken out months ago from a used bookstore. No cause—only habit. He'd indicated it lightly ever since—where irregularities were found, where companies went missing, where people went missing without notice.
He still hadn't discovered the link.
But something hummed under all of this. Something that would not be fully concealed.
At night, Minjae opened up the company's internal acquisition map again. A tiny rural supply chain company had just been acquired by one of their subsidiaries. The message was via Procurement. No alert had been sounded.
Its geographical location occurred to him.
He marked it in his mind: revisit. Not yet. Later.
Closing his laptop, he leaned against the window and gazed out. The street was desolate save for a single delivery bike cutting through rain. Streetlamps burned in golden light, throwing the long shadows.
Minjae remained immobile for minutes.
The world turned slowly, but not at chaos.
And beneath it all—below the metal and stone, the stillness and the rain—he felt it.
Something older than memory.
Something that had not forgotten him.